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David’s Development Tools – 2014 Edition

We all have many different tools that we use in our daily software development tasks. They can even change over time as we find better tools. I develop on a Mac and mainly do Drupal development. Here’s a general inventory of the tools I’m currently using. Perhaps you’ll find something useful to you?

Development Stack – MAMP Pro

I’ve used this since its first version. Version 3 was recently released and it’s great for developers that don’t want to micromanage all the different servers, virtual hosts, and PHP versions on their local machine. I had tried the vagrant + VM route for about a year, but came back to MAMP’s ease of use and simplicity. I’m a believer.

Text Editor – Coda 2

When I need some quick text editing or editing over sftp, I fire up this app. I’m not completely attached to this tool. It has it’s pros and cons, but I had really liked Coda 1 and will keep using Coda 2 until a better lightweight and simple text editor comes along.

Web Browser – Chrome

I used to be a Firefox guy, but when FF 4.0 was released it felt extremely bloated. So I switched to Chrome, which was lighting fast at the time. The developer tools are fantastic and felt better than Firebug (personal preference). Happy to keep using this until something better comes out.

Screenshots – Skitch for Mac 1.0

Great tool for taking quick screenshots of whole windows or just a small section of your screen. Adding annotations and saving those images is a snap. When Evernote bought Skitch, the next version they released was a fiasco and I had to downgrade. I’ll have to re-evaluate newer versions to see if the early Skitch magic was put back into the app.